The U.S. is ready to take its fight against ISIS to another level after recovering a massive trove of intelligence from the terror group’s former facilities in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. intelligence analysts have gained valuable insights into Islamic State’s planning and personnel from a vast cache of digital data and other material recovered from bombed-out offices, abandoned laptops and the cellphones of dead fighters in recently liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.

In the most dramatic gain, U.S. officials over the last two months have added thousands of names of known or suspected Islamic State operatives to an international watch list used at airports and other border crossings. The Interpol database now contains about 19,000 names.

The intelligence haul — the largest since U.S. forces entered the war in mid-2014 — threatens to overwhelm already stretched counter-terrorism and law enforcement agencies in Europe, where Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris, London and Stockholm this year.

[…]

In recent weeks, U.S.-backed ground forces have sent an estimated 30 terabytes of data — equal to nearly two years of nonstop video footage — to the National Media Exploitation Center in Bethesda, Md., a little-known arm of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence.

Analysts there are scrutinizing handwritten ledgers, computer spreadsheets, thumb drives, mobile phone memory cards and other materials for clues to terrorist cells or plots in Europe or elsewhere.

The Gateway Pundit was recently granted a live interview with Dr. Gorka where questions about ISIS were addressed.

The threat of ISIS and the Trump Administrations strategy to combat the terrorist group was the first question Dr. Gorka was presented with during the interview. Questions appear at 3:50 minutes in, and at 6:16.

Wintrich: Are we on track to defeating ISIS? What do you see that timeline looking like? Is there anything you’d recommend to expedite it?

Dr. Gorka: So, when it comes to a specific group like ISIS, we very much are on track . . . We’ve gone from a misdiagnosis under the Obama years that there is no such thing as Jihadism, it’s just poor guys who need jobs, remember the classic line from Marie Harf of the State Department, ‘Oh, we need jobs for Jihadis,’ we ditched that on January the 20th, we understand that this is an ideologically motivated group of people. They’re not refugees, they’re not people who grew up in, you know, Palestinian refugee camps, they are people who have chosen jihad. On top of that, comes the very first moment after the Inauguration, we unleashed our military to do the job they’d been trained to do because this White House trusts them. As a result, Secretary Mattis, to be technical, has gone from a strategy of attrition, of bombers, of a policy that wants to nibble at the edges, a drone strike here, a drone strike there, we’ve gone from attrition to a strategy of annihilation. To quote one special operations guy, ‘Our forces are stacking ISIS like cordwood,’ so, we’re killing them with an aggressive stance that has simply not been seen for the last eight years . . .

Wintrich: Do you think that we created ISIS? Under the Obama years, ISIS was more or less nurtured, do you disagree there?

Dr. Gorka: We did not create ISIS. This is a scurrilous conspiracy theory, this is as bad as saying we created Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden and 9/11 was an inside job, anybody who thinks that is un-American. ISIS was a former part of Al-Qaeda, it was Al-Qaeda in Iraq, it was the local Al-Qaeda franchise, what happened was the Obama policies of leading from behind, the strategic patience, of misdiagnosing the threat and of drawing our troops out of Iraq long before everything was ready. Those helped to facilitate the rise of ISIS but that is very different from saying that ‘we created ISIS,’ which is not true.

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